For these reasons, the adjective “microscopic” in this chapter will take a
rather narrow definition. It will refer to the set of methods globally known
as energy density functional theory (EDF) [1]}. Most of
the techniques developed in the EDF approach are about finding good
approximations to the nuclear many-body wave function without having to deal
with determining the spectrum of the true nuclear many-body Hamiltonian
\(\hat{H}\) . By construction, the EDF theory thus contains a higher degree of
phenomenology than ab initio approaches. At the same time, it is still a
many-body theory of the nucleus, by contrast with, e.g., the liquid drop model.
